I'm putting my prediction hat on again, let's come back in a year and see how well I've done.

If, for whatever reason, you need a spreadsheet with all of the mailing addresses of every sheriff's office in North Carolina (that's 100 sheriff's offices for all 100 counties in North Carolina), I have put together a spreadsheet of mailing addresses for every North Carolina sheriff.

In the previous blog post I went over the design of storage systems and how they protect themselves from data loss in the face of disk failure or unclean shutdowns. If you’re putting together the hardware yourself modern Linux systems and modern hardware give you endless cost, performance and durability tradeoffs for whatever system you want. But 2020 also gives us the cloud, and storage systems in the cloud whose durability far exceeds whatever you could build yourself.

It is the year 2020 and we still don’t have great answers to data durability in the face of unclean shutdowns. Unclean shutdowns are things like power outages, system faults and unlucky kernel panics and preventing data loss when they happen is a hard problem. I’m going to talk through a few ways these can cause data loss in this blog post but you can probably come up with new ones on your own - exotic failures that no system will ever handle correctly. In the year 2020, the conventional wisdom is still true. Always take backups, and RAID is no substitute for backups.

The big news of this year's WWDC is the announcement that Apple's moving desktop Macs onto Apple Silicon, ARM CPUs manufactured by Apple and the first real push at ARM desktops in the industry.

bjoern is a WSGI-compatible web server for Python web applications. It supports both Python 2 and Python 3. Unfortunately the authors don't provide any binary packages but I've created compiled binary wheels for bjoern for Python 2 and 3 for Debian Jessie, Stretch and Buster and Ubuntu Xenial, Trusty and Bionic.

To install the package:

netatalk hasn't been packaged with Debian for a few years now. If you don't want to get your hands dirty with compiling the package you can download compiled (binary) deb packages of netatalk version 3 from my GitHub releases. Right now I have packages for netatalk version 3.1.12 and 3.1.11 for for Debian buster, stretch and jessie.

To install the packages:

I had the desire to go to Japan, and especially Tokyo, because I wanted to spend my next trip in an urban area doing urban things. I felt that the last few vacations had a focus on exploring nature and natural wonders and I wanted to try going the other way. Tokyo is a massive urbanized area with the largest urban population in the world and endless things to do so it fit my goals well.

9/2, the afternoon:

Git, the command-line version control system, was initially released on April 7, 2005. Github launched to the public on April 10, 2008 and was the killer application that promoted Git beyond its initial audience of systems programmers. By 2010 it was clear to me that the industry was moving away from Subversion and Git was the new standard in version control. I took it upon myself to git with the times and learn it for myself.